Better than the first book in the series.

After showing us he can "promise" with the best of them, Ruocchio starts to deliver on those promises made in the first book.

Somewhere in the middle of Howling Dark, he decides he toyed enough with the historical fantasy genre and turns the knob up a few notches, from "some ideas borrowed from other books" almost to an "this I've never read before" level.

Well, maybe not every idea is new, it's hard to be a writer these days, really, every single story was told before, but, as a whole, Howling Dark really feels like "terra incognita". And what and adventure it was to discover it.

He has developed a few new habits that can be a bit annoying, obsessive repetitions of expressions like "why this or that happened I’ll never know" but otherwise his writing is great. Even on the philosophical side a little bit.

I also liked that his hero is not the most righteous, most handsome, most fearless, and by-far-smartest guy in the book.

I liked this book a lot.

On a side note, do you think those Quiet fellows could be the same people that built the Stargate ? ( )

“Within those chilly sepulchers the Cielcin slept, suspended between binary heartbeats like wights awaiting the blood moon to rise again and walk and drink the blood of men.”



In “Howling Dark” by Christopher Ruocchio



"’SF's no good,’ they bellow till we're deaf.

‘But this looks good.’ – "Well then, it's not SF."



In “Relapse 18” (eFanzine) by Robert Conquest, circa 1962





So, what else is new?

Is Ruocchio’s “Howling Dark” SF or is it something else?

Let’s get this out of the way first. I’ve read a few idiots bitching about the use of stream-of-consciousness in this novel. Yes, I know, these nincompoops are not used to reading SF more complicated than “The Hunger Games”… Ruocchio is doing it in a different way: maybe a "stream of pre-consciousness" or “sub-verbal stream-of-consciousness”, i.e., before thought becomes articulate speech. In this kind of stream-of-consciousness one must read “faster”, almost skimming, to get the meaning, rather than trying to think about every word and its place and function in the sentence. In some ways this is exactly the opposite of stream-of-consciousness.

One of the sad facts is that SF has not always attracted the best writers (nor the best of readers…). But then, what is a "best writer" or a “best reader” come to that? Like art and music, beauty is a notion experienced by the beholder. It may sound a bit extreme, but I cannot tolerate even a single sentence by Terry Pratchett, but I can wallow for days on end in the writing of Virginia Woolf. And there are those who think Wolff just drifts and rambles, while Pratchett is incisive and poignant.

Unfortunately, we tend to be guided by things like “The Penguin Book of English Literature” (or anything similar), which in turn informs school, college, and university curricula. Popularity is a sure sign of a deficit of aesthetic value (a “big slice of the market” bespeaks the values of the salesperson, not those of the literary artist).

Search and replacing door with airlock does not make you a science fiction writer. The problem with the themes of science and technology is that these days, people simply do not find them important to their lives. It's not as if they have radically changed the readers’ lives and provide the only realistic solutions to the looming and numerous problems of the future.

Just cast an eye over the authors of Science Fiction and the low quality will be apparent. Here's a short list of these “hacks”: George Orwell (“1984”); Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”); Rex Warner (“The Aerodrome”); Yevgeny Zamyatin (“We”); Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (“Roadside Picnic”); JG Ballard (“The Drowned World”); HG Wells (“The War of the Worlds”); Octavia Butler (“Kindred”); Kazuo Ishiguro (“Never Let Me Go”); L.P. Hartley (“Facial Justice”); Christopher Priest (“The Gradual”, “The Adjacent”, etc.) E.M. Forster (“The Machine Stops”); Kurt Vonnegut (“Harrison Bergeron”); Christopher Ruocchio (“The Empire of Silence”, “Howling Dark”). I could go on. It's terrible that people should read such trash instead of the literary masters…Why does “Howling Dark” belong in this August category you might say? Ah, that would be telling (apart from I said in the first paragraph of this post)…go read it please because nothing I’d say would make the book justice in a SFional context. And forget what some idiots are saying about it.

Snobbery (or anti-snobbery) in literature is as much a nuisance as it is in catering. Some people seem to think books are only good if they are incomprehensibly written and contain no story (like “The Hunger Games” which is utter crap). And then we have books like the “Howling Dark”. Unfortunately the common SF reader likes to read uncritically, i.e., stuff that reproduces lots of old tropes and historical systems without thinking much about them.





SF = Speculative Fiction. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2019/10/review-of-howling-dark-by-christopher.h... ( )